In multi-tiered enterprise production systems, there will often be significant contention for resources among differing programs that perform transactions on databases, located on configured DBMS servers. In particular, certain data blocks, needed to perform concurrent requested transactions, must generally be available to those databases and their respective DBMS servers to perform the requested transactions and to respond to the requesting program.
In many such systems, storage devices maintaining data for one or more DBMS servers might vary significantly, such as in size, latency, and data transmission rate. These factors can significantly affect the responsiveness of the DBMS server in performing and responding to transactions. If these storage devices are not well-disposed, it can lead to a significant reduction in the ability of the various elements of the system to respond rapidly, or even reliably.